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David Crombie’s heroic quest to protect the commons

In his new report, the former Toronto mayor shows a special kind of heroism, and no small amount of irrational optimism

As leader of the municipal reform movement that forever changed the practice and direction of local politics, David Crombie remains the most popular and effective mayor the city has ever known, writes John Barber. (Nick Kozak)

By John Barber

Sun., Dec. 13, 2015

Another year, another “Crombie report.” Another detailed compendium of supple recommendations cleverly designed to tease yet another irksome political problem into submission. The tiny perfect fixer has done it again.

More than 40 years ago, David Crombie fixed Toronto. As leader of the municipal reform movement that forever changed the practice and direction of local politics, Crombie remains the most popular and effective mayor the city has ever known. With his latest effort, the blandly titled Planning for Health, Prosperity and Growth in the Greater Golden Horseshoe: 2015-1041, he and his fellow blue-ribbon panellists have charted the path to fix the entire urban region — one that is fast deteriorating into a large-scale replica of the brutalized cityscape Crombie and his fellow reformers fixed so long ago.

There won’t be much publicity this time around, and the latest report’s recommendations will never circulate beyond a few small groups of government insiders and so-called stakeholders. In that, it is almost the opposite of the grand vision Crombie embraced in Regeneration, the 1992 report of his Royal Commission on the Toronto waterfront, and his first foray into regional planning.

With his latest and likely last statement on that tragic theme, Crombie has moved from the blue skies of what should be done into the vital muck of how to get it done. He and his panel have designed an intricate harness to drive four overlapping land-use plans, a half-dozen provincial ministries, two dozen municipalities, no fewer than 19 ancillary “policies, programs and statutes,” and even more vested interests all together toward a better future. Their report is not great reading, but it is a masterpiece of bureaucratic micro-management in a vital cause.

For those with the eyes to see it, the tragedy is writ large and small throughout the latest Crombie report. The report is a litany of all the intricate reasons why a decade’s application of the most progressive anti-sprawl legislation on the continent has so far failed to dent the pattern of low-density, 100-per-cent auto-dependent development that continues to devour fields and streams on the rapidly advancing urban frontier. It reads like a condensed version of what could have and should have been the 20-year agenda of the regional government we never got in the 1990s.

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And nowhere does it suggest that a single old wizard will be able to fix it all today with one wave of his magic wand. On the contrary, the report’s 87 recommendations are cautious to the point of seeming ineffectual, encouraging and suggesting various actions rather than dictating them. What saves them is that, for the most part, they are so fine-tuned, precisely targeted and responsive to public opinion as gathered over more than a dozen well-attended town-hall meetings throughout the region.

Following those consultations, the panel descended into the policy engine room and produced a diagram showing exactly which levers to pull and which valves to turn to make a laggardly system work the way it should. The result is as close to legislation as any white paper could get.

There is some crunch within this otherwise bland menu of sensible recommendations. On the two most contentious issues, the panel calls for both a greater degree of suburban intensification — re-development inside already built-up areas — and higher densities in the “greenfield” sites that are made available for future development. The balance of the report amounts to a wide-ranging defence of that new model.

Cutting across much opinion that still prevails in the corridors of suburban civic centres, the panel makes a strong case that the densities targeted in the 2005 growth plan, considered ambitious at the time, are actually too low to produce what it calls complete communities — those “with vibrant mixed uses, transit-supportive densities and infrastructure for walking and cycling.”

But getting to that long-sought planner’s paradise requires a good deal more finesse than merely mandating new numbers. Rather than striking hard in any one dimension, the Crombie panel adopted a python strategy, hoping to capture runaway development in coils of muscular regulation and slowly squeeze it into submission.

No details escape its embrace, neither the jiggery-pokery of settlement area expansion studies nor the infernal effects of the Ontario Highway Access Management Guidelines

This of course is the longest of all long games. As the panel noted, 10 years is barely enough time to judge the effectiveness of any land-use plans as large and ambitious as these. Much of the region’s continuing sprawl was planned and approved even before the legislation under review was enacted. Safely assuming that the province adopts them, it will be another generation before these latest recommendations for saving Toronto from itself prove their worth.

In space there is the tragedy of the commons, and in time there is the tragedy of foresight — the fact that so few of us are willing or even able to undertake work that we know to be essential but that promises no immediate benefit. Actually doing it requires a special kind of heroism, and no small amount of irrational optimism.

In his 80th year, having just buried his only son, David Crombie is quietly brimming with both, still pointing the way to a better future without himself in it. By rights his example alone, let alone the 87 fine-tuned recommendations of the latest Crombie report, would be enough to bring it about.

John Barber is a freelance journalist. Follow him on Twitter @annegonian

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